Paper short abstract:

'Pupil-Voice' aims to understand mental-health challenges from youth-perspectives, but predominantly English text-based Pupil-Voice may exclude SEND/ESOL student priorities from decision-making about them. Robinson proposes 'ABC', a multimodal, ethnographic Citizen Science approach as the solution.

Paper long abstract:

Following austerity measures, Covid, and the cost-of-living-crisis, children’s mental health stats have worsened: 1.7million+ UK-based children are persistently absent from schools, with heightened anxiety and depression the most common mental health symptoms experienced by disadvantaged young people in deprived areas. Statistics are worse for children w/Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, unsettled/refugee status, or in Alternate Provision/Pupil Referral Units. Though government-endorsed 'Pupil-Voice' initiatives aim to understand these alarming statistics from youth-perspectives, the predominance of English-centred/text-based Pupil-Voice excludes many vulnerable pupils' pressures/priorities from decision-making about them. Children impacted by trauma show higher rates of anxiety, ADHD and disruptive disorders; 11% of excluded children with ADHD have been excluded permanently (O'Regan 2010). Once permanently excluded from mainstream education they have statistically worse health and social outcomes, getting stuck in a kind of social/educational ‘enclosure’ (Perera 2020), which leads to a Sisyphean state from which excluded young people may never leave. Choices are either unknown or unavailable to them and they often go unseen by the decision-makers who determine their care and support.

During 3-years of Leverhulme-supported pilots, Robinson has co-constructed with young people/educators a creative, largely non-textual autoethnographic 'Anthropology By Children' curriculum to unpack how embodied in-schools/extracurricular experiences generate children's baseline health/self-advocacy/future-thriving. Through centring children’s voices in the design and data that emerges from this work, the ABC project aims to shift normative expectations of what health advocacy looks/sounds like and ensuring rigorous re-contextualisation of what knowledge (both of oneself and of others) and transformation is possible through amplifying young people in research.